<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>don't fear the reaper by andromedaries</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102875">don't fear the reaper</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromedaries/pseuds/andromedaries'>andromedaries</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>62nd hunger games, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coping Mechanisms, Drinking, Effie is in charge, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Graphic Smut, Oral Sex, Partially Clothed Sex, Smut, and Haymitch is very ok with it</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 14:01:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,834</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102875</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromedaries/pseuds/andromedaries</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>it's not the first time haymitch has lost both tributes at the cornucopia, but it is the first time he's found an unexpected friend in his escort</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Haymitch Abernathy &amp; Effie Trinket, Haymitch Abernathy/Effie Trinket</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>don't fear the reaper</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>alrighty dear readers, yall seemed to like my last smutty writing so i took another crack at it. i'll say if the first one was Smut Zero this one is Diet Smut - i got a little braver but still not really explicit. and i still have zero concept of pacing with this kind of thing so i'm definitely still winging it in that respect. but anyway. i imagine this is set around the 62nd games, making haymitch 28, and we don't have a canon timeline for effie's age as far as i know so i'm imagining her to be maybe like 22-23.<br/>also noteworthy that for a lot of games details that we'd see from a mentor's perspective but didn't ever see from katniss's perspective in the original narrative, i take a lot of inspiration from the end of the world series by fernwithy, which i highly recommend and more or less accept as canon</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The cannon blasts seem to resound as loud and final in the mentors' viewing center as they did in the arena. Nine in a row, tolling the abrupt end of nine consciousnesses, nine unbeating hearts, maybe even nine eternal souls. Including both of his own tributes. Again. </p><p>They hadn't lasted ten minutes. Again.</p><p>Somewhere deep in his hollow chest, a person Haymitch used to be rages and shouts and rails against the injustice of it all. But barely a whisper of that breaks through anymore, and right now, in the moment he relives like a recurring nightmare every year, he can't hear it at all over the sound of his own uselessness. Short of personally assassinating President Snow, there is nothing he can do about district kids getting sent to the Games. But here he is, the one hope standing between his tributes and the certainty of their bloody, terrorized, televised deaths, unable to save a single one of them.</p><p>His eyes stay fixed blankly on the two dark screens in front of him. His mouth tastes like sandpaper, dry enough to feel it all the way in his sinuses. Nothing left to do now but get a drink.</p><p>When Effie finds him at the bar in the mentors' lounge three drinks later, his eyes are still as empty and dead as they had been when his tributes' screens went dark. He doesn't notice her until he registers the warmth of a small hand on his back. He looks up to acknowledge her by way of a greeting, and thinks he can see something weary cracking through the plastic professional expression she usually maintains. Perhaps the utterly fruitless efforts to court sponsors and audiences take their toll on even the most maniacally cheerful Games staff after working with the cannon-fodder districts long enough, he supposes. But her voice is gentle when she suggests they head back to 12's apartment, and the light squeeze of her hand on his shoulder is comforting in a kind of mindless way, so he knocks back the rest of his drink and lets her lead him back to the tribute training center. </p><p>She curls up on the couch when they get there, and he finds himself at the dining room’s minibar without ever really deciding to go there. "Drink?" he asks her through a mouthful of the glass cork from the decanter he's pouring whisky from. </p><p>"Sure," she answers, "sauvignon blanc?" </p><p>"Yes ma'am." He clatters uncarefully through the kitchen for one of those ridiculous stemless cut-crystal glasses she likes, thinking that three drinks from now they'll be begging him to shatter one. </p><p>"You remembered my ice cubes," she remarks when he hands over her wine and slumps onto the other side of the couch. She looks surprised and a little embarrassed.</p><p>"Course I did," he grumbles, "you drink the same thing every time." Every year they went through this unspoken routine. He sobers up for their tributes' last week on this earth and tries futilely to save them, they die horribly at the godforsaken Cornucopia, and then Effie joins him in the penthouse for exactly one drink before going home. White wine in a stemless glass, with those two ice cubes that she never allows herself when they're dining in expensive restaurants with potential sponsors or Games reporters. Some kind of asinine rich people rule about how to be rich properly, which evidently excludes the egregious faux pas of chilling your wine. He doesn't know why she lets him see her indulging this supposedly embarrassing preference any more than he knows why she bothers to stay and have a drink with him in the first place. Some sense of pity or responsibility for him most likely, maybe some measure of vestigial sympathy for the dead children she's spent the past week with. Or maybe it's just that after the last few years of working together, they're found a little space somewhere between the bickering and the nagging where they're actually kind of comfortable around each other. </p><p>She glances at the TV remote as she sips her wine, but doesn't make any movement toward it. Some years they watch the Games after they've lost their stake in them and some they don't. She leaves it up to him, and he gives her some credit for picking up on the convolution of his feelings on the matter. Some years he wants to push the Games as far out of his mind as possible, but at the moment he's starting to sense this will be one of the years he keeps watching out of some futile sense of responsibility to his dead tributes, as if keeping up this self-flagellating vigil of the duration of their massacre can do them any good now. </p><p>He puts the Games on the TV. Effie fiddles with the lacing on her impractical shoes until she can tug them off and tuck her feet primly up on the couch, and he tries to get a feel for what's happened since the Cornucopia. In the 60 seconds before the gong had sounded, he had managed to grasp the general layout and landscape of the arena, but now that he'd chased off the ringing pounding feeling in his head with the drink he'd been itching for all week, he could see it clearer. The arena was small compared to most years, mostly marsh land and swelteringly hot - a perfect storm for a short Games, between the small arena and the choice between potential dehydration or risking bacterial infection from the muddy water, not to mention the nine already dead in the first day. He sees that the boy from 1 also took a nasty leg wound in the bloodbath - far from a mortal injury, but more than enough to slow him down, and in the arena you cannot afford to be slowed down. If you can't run for your life, you're a dead man walking. </p><p>Looks like this is one of the years that no matter how cold and dead and bled-out his tributes are, the inner strategist he probably owed his own victory to would not be giving him any peace and quiet tonight. He sighs and takes a gulp of his drink. </p><p>"How long you think the boy from 1's got?" he asks Effie conversationally, because affecting detachment is the only way to survive this shit without losing your mind more than he already has. </p><p>Effie considers this conversationally, because she's spent enough time around victors to understand that they need that. Maybe she's even spent enough time around tributes to understand <em>why </em>they need that. "Probably not long... He's a liability with that leg, so I doubt his allies will protect him if it comes down to it. He'll be the easy target if they run into that other alliance... he won't even see the melee."</p><p>"Not like he would have a chance even if he did."</p><p>Effie swirls her wine pensively, immaculate nails clicking against the glass. The intricate carvings cut into the crystal catch the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off her strange iridescent nail polish. It had initially appeared to be pink, but now he noticed it shimmered blue when the light hit it this way. Capitol beauty is bizarre. The nail polish is interesting, he supposes, and certainly in keeping with Effie's garish taste, but it's not like she needed that to be attractive. He doesn't think anyone would disagree that she's objectively good-looking regardless of what crazy clothes and wigs and makeup she had on. Guess Capitolites have to find something to spend all their money on. </p><p>"He really doesn't have a chance, does he," she says. He looks up at her. "He said in his interview he wanted to win so he could pay for his little sister’s schooling for work in a gemstone engineering laboratory." She swallows the last of her wine. "And he's one of the ones who could have had a chance. We all cry for the skinny twelve year old girls... but that boy from 1 will be just as dead as they are. And so will 22 others."</p><p>Haymitch is dumbfounded for a moment. </p><p>His eyes dart around the room instinctively, as if any bugs that might be planted in the apartment would be in plain sight. Everyone already knew <em>he </em>was a seditionist, but these were hardly acceptable views of the Games for a Capitol citizen, a Games employee no less, to be thinking, much less speaking. Thankfully, she seems to pick up on this concern, and clamps her lips shut. </p><p>But he's already amazed. Since when did <em>Effie</em> of all people see the Games for what they really are? He gave her credit for being kind to the tributes, for caring enough about them to get them everywhere on time and for working hard on 12's sponsor relations, but she still voluntarily made her living as 12's own personal reaper, leading two children off to their deaths year after year. </p><p>"Why do you work for the Games if you think that?" he asks, still gaping at her. His tone is harsher than he meant it to be, and he gulps down another swig of whisky. </p><p>She recoils a bit, but recovers quickly. With a glance around the room similar to his earlier, she turns the volume up on the tributes from 5, 6, and 8 tangling with a nest of mutt-rats. She scoots closer to him on the couch to let him hear her lowered voice when she speaks. </p><p>"It was my dream to work for the Games when I was a little kid, and my parents encouraged the idea quite enthusiastically. It's a very esteemed line of work here, practically like being a celebrity. And I always thought the tributes were so brave, and I wanted to work with them." Her voice drops even lower. "Thought myself quite the humanitarian, wanting to throw a bone to the poor District children. I had no idea how different it would be when I actually <em>knew</em> those kids." She looks down into her empty glass, long silvery eyelash extensions hitting a strange angle. "I know it's better than another war, but I can't help wondering if there isn't some other way." </p><p>Haymitch is utterly lost for words. Is this the same Effie he's worked with for six years, with all her horribly timed comments about their tributes' table manners, all her ignorance and privilege and shallow, complacent priorities? He needs a minute to form a response to all this. He needs a damn drink. </p><p>When he gets up to pour himself one, Effie Trinket shocks him once more: she holds her empty glass up to him and says, "Refill?"</p><p>In six years of working with Effie, she has never once had a second drink with him. He takes the glass and mentally doubles the amount of time he's allotted himself to figure out what the hell to do with all of this. </p><p>He holds her drink out to her when he sits back down. She turns to face him when she takes it, sitting cross-legged on the couch with her strange leafy dress arranged demurely over her lap, and clinks her glass against his lightly. He looks hard back at her. Thankfully the tributes on screen are doing nothing interesting; the 5, 6, and 8 alliance's argument over whether they should risk building a fire to cook the rats they killed or try to eat them raw drowns them out from any bugs in the room without being a distraction. </p><p>"Why do you still do this if you question it so much?" he asks her finally. </p><p>"Well... me asking questions doesn't change the fact that someone is going to be standing on that stage calling names. I could debate all day long about whether I should work for the Games, but the Games will happen either way. But what I can do is help those kids have the best experience they can during their time in the Capitol. If a friendly face and a well-kept schedule is what I can do for them, I'd like to do it for them."</p><p>This is far too much new information to process about Effie Trinket for Haymitch to form a proper response, so he just keeps studying her, with her champagne-colored wig and her leaf-covered dress, the eyelashes and nail polish and makeup that are so visually discordant in his mind from the words she's been saying. She might still be all the things about her that have chafed at him for years, silly and shallow and privileged and complacent. But he has quite suddenly found there is no longer room on that list for "ignorant."</p><p>And, he thinks, since the whisky in his blood is being more honest with him than he usually is with himself, she's kind. She comforts your kids when they're terrified and straightens the wrinkles out of their shirts before their interviews and reminds them to walk out there with their chins up. And while we're being honest, she's kinda hot when she's bossing you around. </p><p>On a second thought, maybe he should slow down on the whisky. The touch of heat creeping up the back of his neck is the last thing he needs right now. He wrenches his attention back to the tributes on the screen. "You sure are full of surprises, sweetheart," he says finally, hoping to pull back toward a lighter conversation. </p><p>He watches the career alliance starting to set up shelter for the night in their camp that seems to monopolize the only patch of dry ground in the entire arena, but when their tents are set up and they start trying to wrestle some very damp wood into taking flame, he thinks he can feel Effie's eyes on him again. Or still. Was she expecting him to say something? He's hardly the sparkling conversationalist out of the two of them. He represses a sigh. </p><p>"When did you decide you wanted to work for the Games?" he tries, eyes still on the TV. The idea of Effie as a little kid had stuck in his mind; he can't imagine what she would have been like before all the wigs and makeup, and this seemed like a normal enough conversation topic. To his surprise, Effie giggles a bit. He looks up at her, confused by her response, and it might just be the wine but he thinks he sees a bit of a flush warming her cheeks. </p><p>"Funny you should ask that," she says, her tone affectedly light but her gaze dancing away from him. "It was during your Games, if you can believe it. You and your ally made quite the impression on me."</p><p>The mention of Maysilee Donner hits him like one of her poison darts straight to his heart, letting her death leach out from where he had buried it and flood his lungs as fresh and searing as it was every time he allowed himself to remember her.</p><p>Effie pauses a moment before she resumes her story - maybe his thoughts were written all over his face, he couldn't tell. "I got into trouble at school that year for saying I wanted you and Maysilee Donner both to live and that it wasn't fair only one of you could. I had to do a lot of remedial assignments about how humanity can't afford another war and why the Games are necessary to prevent one. My parents were very worried about the whole thing, but the idea of me working for the Games assuaged their concerns and they kind of latched onto it. I suppose I felt some pressure from them. But you and Maysilee made me ask questions the first time. I think I thought if I could just see the Games from the inside I would finally get some answers."</p><p>Haymitch is reeling. He didn't think anyone outside of 12 even remembered his friend Maysie had ever lived. The last person on earth he expected to hear her name from was was Effie Trinket. "I'm glad you remember her," is all he says. He's surprised to feel Effie take his hand in both of hers. </p><p>"I'm sorry," she says gently. "It must be hard for you to think about her." </p><p>He just nods, arranging a normal expression back on his face and stomping the old hurt back down beneath the surface again. "She should have won," he says, keeping a neutral tone. "I wouldn't have made it without her." That much was just the facts - there was no arguing that he owed her his life in the arena. She had saved him. He hadn't saved her. </p><p>Effie squeezes his hand. "Don't be silly, Haymitch, you earned your win just as much as any other victor. Probably more so." He glares at her incredulously. "I don't mean she didn't," she amends hastily, "neither of you deserved to die. I just mean you shouldn't keep telling yourself you didn't deserve to live. Your maneuver with the force field at the end was brilliant." </p><p>"Please, Effie, I didn't even do that on purpose! I meant to throw her into the force field, but by the time I got there I couldn't. The thing with the axe was just me somehow spending my entire life's worth of luck in one insane second." He shuts his eyes against the image flooding back into his mind of the axe splitting the girl's face. "All I did to beat that crazy bitch was bleed out slower than her."</p><p>"Haymitch. Look at me." </p><p>He does. She meets his eyes for the first time since he asked when she decided to work for the games. "Using the force field was a stroke of genius whether it went according to plan or not. Nothing ever goes like you plan it in the arena. And everyone knows your win was brilliant, no matter what the media had to say about it later." </p><p>He cocks an eyebrow at her. "Everyone?" he says sardonically. Please. Everyone had already forgotten about him. </p><p>"I know it was brilliant," she says. "I knew it back then too." She hesitates a bit, but then smiles. "I'm sure it's not entirely professional to say so, but I actually had quite the crush on you back then."</p><p>He snorts, his deflection immediate and instinctual. "You had a crush on the world's biggest smartass then." </p><p>She laughs, a sweet girlish laugh that makes him actually realize what she has just said to him. "Perhaps," she muses, looking up at him from under her long metallic eyelashes. Was she doing that on purpose? Maybe he hadn't imagined the occasional times throughout the years when he thought he caught her eyes lingering on him. Had she really had a crush on him? He's sure he's made more than a few sloppy alcohol-addled passes at her over the years, but he never actually thought they would be acted on. She had always maintained her impeccable professionalism. But now...?</p><p>She still hasn't looked away. Her eyes burning into his makes something long-dormant twist warmly in his stomach, but as he watches the crystal glass touch her shiny, lacquered lips again, he stifles the feeling. This is just some kind of wine-fueled manifestation of stress from the Games, and maybe some misdirected loneliness. He looks away from her and extricates his hand from hers to scrub at his hair. "Effie, I don't know if you even know what you're saying," he hedges. "You've had a lot to drink-"</p><p>"Oh, please, Haymitch, I've had two glasses of wine. What is that there, your fifth?"</p><p>"In several hours," he protests, rising to his feet, "and my alcohol tolerance gets a lot more practice than yours does. Look, I just don't want to... overstep-"</p><p>"Haymitch. Look at me." She catches his hand again. "If anyone's overstepping, it's me. Am I overstepping?" </p><p>It hits him abruptly that this is something that could actually happen, and might actually be about to happen. His head swims a bit. Aside from various Capitol flings and tumbles during his first cataclysmic years of being a victor, which he was always too drunk to actually think much about beforehand, he hasn't done this since...</p><p>For the second time tonight, old buried grief comes boiling back up again. He hasn't done this with anyone who mattered to him since his girl was murdered. And whatever Effie was to him - coworker? friend? - her presence in his life was not disposable. </p><p>But as she tugs his hand lightly, encouraging him to sit back down but pushing no further, he thinks that maybe it doesn't have to be monumental. It isn't love and it doesn't have to be. Friends can take comfort in each other, and the Effie he's seen tonight might actually be someone he can call a friend. And he's been alone a long time. </p><p>He sits back down slowly and meets her eyes. "You're not overstepping."</p><p>Something in her expression seems to melt a bit as her hand reaches up to brush his unruly dark hair back, and her hand stays lightly on his face when she brings her mouth up to meet his, warm and firm and gentle. His arms wrap around her waist, hands skating up her back in her ridiculous leaf dress as their lips move against each other. The fact that its <em>Effie </em>whose small warm body is pressing against him is surprisingly thrilling - he wouldn't have ever expected this to happen, but now that it is, he's wondering why it hadn't happened sooner. Her arms wind around his neck, and when their lips part to let their searching tongues find each other she makes a soft little sighing sound into his mouth that makes his blood feel ten degrees hotter. Her hand slides up the back of his neck to run her fingers through his hair, sending electricity tingling down his spine. His instinct is to reciprocate, but when her shimmery hair brushes his fingers he remembers that although it's one of her more sensible ones, it is still a wig, and surely it can't be tugged on the way he likes with his own hair. He settles for sliding a hand where her neck meets her shoulder, thumbing at her jaw. He feels a teasing graze of her teeth on his bottom lip and kisses her deeper, and he's answered with a much sharper bite. It makes him pull back for a moment to see what she's trying to tell him, but he's met with a wicked flash in her eyes and he knows in that look that something between them has shifted.</p><p>Two can play at that game. </p><p>He slides his hands back down to her hips to shove her back up against the armrest of the couch and, hearing her breath leave her somewhere between a laugh and a gasp, moves in close again to drag her earlobe between his teeth. The sugary, flowery scent that seemed to radiate from her skin washes over him, making him more lightheaded than anything he's had to drink tonight. She locks one leg around his back while his kisses and bites burn into her neck and shoulder, letting her head fall back and her sharp little fingernails reach down to tug his shirt untucked and scrape up and down that unbearably sensitive skin between his hipbones and his ribs. His stomach muscles contract involuntarily when her nails bite into the scar of his axe wound, but he doesn't stop her, as if letting her push through the ghost of its pain could somehow purge him of it. Her fingers wander down further to wind into his belt loops, pulling his body closer, and between her heel digging into his back and the aching pressure of her hips arching up into him it's all he can do to growl "bedroom?" into her ear, and she nods against his shoulder where her face is buried. </p><p>He climbs off the couch and pulls her up with him by both hands, and they stumble toward his room with their hungry kisses never pausing. He shuts the door behind them by slamming her back into it, pinned by the hips, and she just takes him by the belt loops again and keeps kissing him breathless. He's brought up short for a moment when her hand sneaks back to give a sharp-nailed handful of his ass a squeeze, and she takes his moment of hesitation as an opportunity to grab him by the collar and spin them around, slamming him into the wall as hard as he had. The wicked gleam is back in her eyes and his blood is pounding - he crashes their mouths back together and lets the thrill of something new course through him. Things were always sweet and tentative with his girl all those years ago, young and inexperienced as they were, and all the Capitolites who pursued victors always seemed to want to be a little scared. Not surprising for people who got off on making pets of the barbarian district kids they'd already made murderers of, he supposes, but he couldn't deny it was fun to rough them up a bit, cathartic even. But now his stomach is knotting up with the anticipation that perhaps the only thing hotter than roughing someone up a bit was being roughed up a bit. And with Effie telling him what to do and where to be for the last six years, he couldn't say the thought hadn't crossed his mind. </p><p>Her right hand stays tangled in his shirt collar, forearm locked against his shoulder, and she's too tiny to be half as strong as he is but he lets her other hand pin his wrist against the wall next to his head anyway, just because seeing her so on fire to have her way with him is so unbearably hot. "God, Effie," he groans in her ear, because he has the sense it'd work her up to hear him say as much, "so hot when you're pushing me around." He gives her a little smirk as the fire in her eyes surges. </p><p>"If that's the case, I think I better have you on the bed then," she drawls, dragging his lip between her teeth again. He bites her right back and then lets himself be dragged by the belt back toward the bed. She's the one pushing him back against the pillows this time and he is just fine with that. After all these years of his tributes looking to him for hope, not knowing what a desperate tooth-and-nail struggle it is to find even a scrap of control over their fates in the arena, letting someone else take the lead on anything at all is more a relief than anything. She's got one knee on either side of his hips, her fingers flying down the buttons of his shirt, and his hands start searching the leaves of her dress for a zipper. She pushes his shirt off his shoulders and lets him slide her zipper down her back, rising up on her knees to let him lift the dress off over her head.</p><p>He has to stop and hold her at an arm's length for a second just to marvel at the miles of pale creamy skin before him, her frilly little matching underthings made of light blue lace and the tiny bit of metal glinting in her navel, silver with two shiny little opalescent stones embedded in it. He'd seen those on Capitol TV before, but never up so close. She giggles a bit at the unspoken compliment, and he pulls her close to him again, hands restless on her back as he buries his face in her chest, kissing her sternum and breathing hard.</p><p>His mouth is on her collarbone when he feels a sharp dig of nails in his back, and when he pulls away to see if she's trying to tell him something, the fire in her eyes has retreated, clouding with something else. "Not yet," she entreats him, and he realizes her hands are holding his still where they're tugging at her bra clasp. <em>Oh, </em>he thinks, and moves his hands back to her waist instead, kissing her a bit slower. </p><p>"Sorry," she whispers against his face, and he wonders where all her confidence went. </p><p>"Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart," he says into her ear, and her sudden tension starts to melt away again. Her hands come back up to his face to give him a tender kiss and a grateful smile as the last of the clouds burn away from her eyes. She's still straddling his lap, and when she moves against him, fierceness teasing back into her face and heat building between them delicious and unbearable, he can't seem to keep his hands from sliding down to her ass to crash their bodies together harder. She gasps a bit and finally reaches down for his belt buckle, releasing some of the aching pressure with it and twisting up his stomach again, and by the time she's kissed her way down his chest, his guts are knotted up and burning with anticipation. Then the next second she's back up by his face, breath hot in his ear and hands at his zipper. </p><p>"Two rules," she breathes, "stay very still, and tap my shoulder when you're close." She gives him one more wicked smirk, and before he's even got time to respond, she's pinning his hips under her hands and drowning out every coherent thought he's ever had in the sweet searing heat of her impossible mouth. </p><p>Somewhere miles away, beyond the waves crashing over him, she had told him to be still, so he makes his one hand that isn't digging nails into her shoulder knot itself in the sheets beside her head instead of her shimmering hair. </p><p>His sense of time passing has been written over with electrified nerve endings, so he has no idea how long it goes on. No idea how long he's forgotten what year it is and what country he's in and what the Games are. No idea how long he's forgotten who Haymitch Abernathy and Effie Trinket are, forgotten what words like district and capitol and victor and escort mean, no idea how long they exist simply as Him and Her. He has no idea how long it's been when the burning white heat is threatening to explode and he remembers to tap her shoulder. </p><p>Effie comes swimming back into his field of vision, wig mussed and cheeks beautifully flushed. She rolls to lay beside him and pull him over her, and between her warm coaxing hands and his hips grinding against her through that thin blue lace she finally brings him crashing over the edge he's teetering on, sinking his teeth into her shoulder to stay quiet. </p><p>He lets himself float through the daze of aftershocks for a few moments, distantly feeling her hands situate him back in his unzipped pants and return to roam across his back. But soon enough he starts to sense her hungry impatience burning through the fog, and he swims back down to earth to kiss her again, first her sweet mouth and then everywhere he can find. Every inch of her is soft and warm and waxed as smooth as milky white marble, and that damned belly button ring... if it had been tempting before, it was indescribable now, claimed as it was where he'd spilled across her stomach. He cleans her up with a handful of the soft sheets now as he mouths at her through the lace of her bra. He doesn't make a move for the clasp again - she'd take the initiative on that if or when she wants to, he figures - just soaks up every hitch of her breath and arch of her back as her hands on his skin grow more and more restless. Every movement itches for reciprocity, and who is he to keep her waiting? Head still fuzzy and limbs still loose, he kisses his way down her beautiful stomach, giving the barbell in her navel a flick with his tongue before tugging her pretty blue lace out of the way with his teeth. He gives her a few teasing licks just to hear her gasp and feel her hands knot in his hair, but he doesn't hold out on her for long.</p><p>His head is swimming in her scent and her sounds and her heel digging into his back again, pushing against his shoulder when her hips arch up to him, when she untangles one hand from his hair to find one of his. She pulls it up to her lips and draws one finger after another into her mouth, sucking lightly, letting tongue and teeth graze each one until she can't anymore, and he's almost glad she's shaking too much to continue now because if she kept at it she'd get him hot all over again. And now's not the time for that, now is just about Effie, Effie Trinket who is still somehow impossibly the person coming apart and gasping and shaking to pieces under him. </p><p>What a baffling world this was. He never thought she could look this lovely.</p><p> </p><p>He wakes up feeling more rested than he ever does during the Games, sated in a way no number of bottles drained and then shattered has ever accomplished. Effie is already gone, but when he sits up, rather stiff in the pants he realizes he never got all the way off last night, he sees a note laying on the nightstand. The sweet looping script on it reads, </p><p>
  <em>Thanks for everything, see you next year. Give me a call if you need anything. Effie</em>
</p><p>He's thrown off by the last bit - give her a call? Did he even have a phone number for her? She must have written it down at some point for Games business, but he can't imagine what he would have done with it. He'd never thought much about Effie when it wasn't Games season. But now, with his sheets still smelling like a secret musky version of her flowery perfume, he has no doubt she will cross his mind this year. The more he learns about her, the less he knows what to make of her, and his mind had never known how to set down a puzzle that needed solving. But, it occurs to him, one thing he's fairly certain of is that the next time she arrives for the reaping in District 12, the image she calls to his mind will no longer be the scythe-bearing reaper of barely-remembered myths, appearing to demand the deaths of two children each year. Their deaths will still be demanded, of course. But perhaps she's only Charon, ferrying them to their deaths over the river of even older myths, but holding their shaking hands as they go. </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>